The proliferation of linguistic tools for analysis has opened new avenues for historians working in the digital realm. Textual analysis is the study of newspaper articles, books, laws, oral histories, and other forms of human communication. Textual analysis digital tools better enable historians to decipher language usage, frequency, and significance in the context of discourse, rhetoric, and ideas. These robust digital tools thereby provide numerous possibilities that can inform historical research and communication strategies that can introduce new thinking into the current historiography. Brian Pytlik Zillig at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (CDRH) at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln developed TokenX as a powerful tool for analyzing text. While TokenX continues to undergo revision and further development, tools like this one can help historians integrate textual analysis in their research to analyze connections in language and across several texts.

With tools like Google Earth, historians can construct interactive and engaging forms of history. Users can generate graphical representations of events to visually convey events. For instance, Google and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) collaborated to spread awareness of the genocide in Darfur [link]. The overlay they generated includes descriptive HTML that presents users with first-hand testimonies, pictures, the locations of refugee camps, and links to video clips. The Darfur map included an overlay that could be turned on that displayed 3D columns to visually represent the numbers of displaced persons. Teachers may speak of 200,000 displaced individuals, but to visually represent such numbers conveys greater weight to a subject. The same approach could be taken with historical events, such as using columns to display war casualties in World War II or the location and relevant information of Nazi death camps. Additionally, students could get an idea of how early cartographers viewed the planet with the Dave Rumsey historical maps [link] or explore the geographic and historical data related to the 1906 San Francisco earthquake [link].

With so much going on in the last few months, Digital Clio has regrettably fallen to the wayside. Since nothing has appeared here since April, I thought the blog deserved a brief update running through everything going on:

Rawley Conference
At the end of April I was elected to be the Chair/Director of the James A. Rawley Conference in the Humanities, a graduate-student run conference held on the campus of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Over the next few months the groundwork will be put in place for the conference, including when the conference will be held, the theme of the conference, and arranging the keynote speaker.

We’re also hoping to launch a blog to make it easier for us to keep in touch with those interested in the Rawley Conference. In the mean time, you can follow updates on the Conference with Twitter.

Wedding Bells in the Air
At the end of June I married my best friend and other half. We were also in the process of relocating to a new apartment. She was also busy finishing up tasks related to her degree/new job. Needless to say, May and June were incredibly busy for both of us.

Onwards and UpwardsIn the middle of moving and wrapping up wedding plans, I finished writing my thesis in June and successfully defended it at the beginning of this month. The last week or so has been spent trying to finish revisions and suggestions brought up by my thesis committee. It will be a great feeling to have it off my desk! This fall I’ll be starting the Ph.D. program at UNL.

Buffalo Bill’s Wild WestBrent and I were both hired to work as Research Assistants for the coming academic year with the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming, which is starting the Papers of Buffalo Bill digital history project. Brent is handling research on the Rough Riders and I am tackling the show Indians Cody used in his Wild West shows. The goal, on my end at least, is the creation of a database tracking the name of Native American performers, tribal and linguistic affiliations, their hometowns, what parts they played in the show, among other things.

Teaching Historical Thinking
During the spring semester I served as a teaching assistant for Dr. William Thomas, along with my colleague Leslie Working. Throughout the course of the semester we devoted much time and energy to fostering historical thinking among our undergraduates by using digital technology such as PRS Clickers and Wikis for group writing assignments. Leslie and I are co-writing an article about the results we received over the semester that we hope to publish in the near future. In October, we will be presenting our results to the Teaching History Forum hosted by the History Department at UNL.

TokenX Review
Brent and I are also co-writing a review of TokenX that should appear onDigital History in the next couple of weeks.

Related to Digital History, we’re currently in the process of creating a digital historian directory, which will provide a way for historians to connect with one another and view projects they are working on. You may want to watch Digital Clio or the Doing Digital History blog for news of its launch.

Book Chapter Drafts
Brent and I both have book chapters either out to publishers, or will soon have them submitted to publishers. I anticipate heavy amounts of editing in the future, but for the mean time, they’re off my desk.

A Blogging Resolution
Finally, I hope to pay much more attention to the blog from here on out. I hope the blog will become a central place where you can see my thought process or read my thoughts/ideas on digital history. My plan is to set aside chunks of time to devote to the blog where I can post something new at least twice a month (baby steps…), but ideally I would have something new every week. You can also follow me on Twitter (@jaheppler) or FriendFeed (jaheppler). If you haven’t already, you may want to subscribe to our blog.

This post by Rafael Alvarado has been making the rounds on Twitter and got me thinking about, more specifically, what material would be a useful introduction to digital history (as opposed to digital humanities). Here’s my list in chronological order:

If you were completely new to digital history and trying to get a grasp of what it was about and what it entailed, this is the list I would probably hand you. The texts might be a bit heavy on the development of digital history as a field rather than the theory of digital history, but at twenty-one books, essays, and projects, I thought I’d cut the list off before it became unwieldy. Perhaps I’ll add a post about reading material for a theory of digital history to my blog post idea list (which grows and grows…). Clearly, this list is not a definite canon of digital history, but I think it gives you a good picture of where the field has been and where it might be going. I’ve tried to catalog a variety of projects and reading material that I found important to my understanding how the field has (and is) developed.

Any other suggestions? Nit-picks? Disagreements? Leave a comment, I’d love to hear from you!

On Friday, Brent, myself, and our colleagues Nic Sweirscek, Michelle Teidje, and Robert Voss will be participating at the Western Social Sciences Association Conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in a roundtable we proposed entitled “Historical Scholarship in the Digital Age: Asking New Questions and Exploring New Forms of Scholarly Communication with Digital Techniques.” You can find our abstract below the fold.

The conference is open to the public, so we hope some of you can join us. If you cannot, we will be doing a wrap-up of the discussion on the blog. Also, I hope to provide a live feed of sorts on Twitter by tweeting the roundtable (you can follow me @jaheppler).

Commentators, participants, and historians have suggested connections between the media and the political movements of the 1960s and their interactions that allowed activists to communicate their agendas. By utilizing media coverage of the Trail of Broken Treaties and ensuing occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1972 by the American Indian Movement, Indian activists secured a medium in which to voice their goals. The study of the relationship between mass media and the protest movements is important, historian Julia Bond has argued, because “until historians unravel the complex links between the southern freedom struggle and the mass media, their understanding of how the Movement functioned, why it succeeded, and when and where it failed, will be incomplete.” Bond’s declaration can be extended to other movements of the 1960s and 1970s that utilized mass media to their advantage.

The American Indian Movement forcefully inserted their agenda into public discourse and used the print medium to insert their voice into public policy debates. What sort of things were activists talking to the media about? What was the media reporting? Omitting? What was AIM’s message? Did the media report the demonstrator’s goals or was the message lost in the sensationalism of the occupation? Was the occupation of the BIA a successful strategy for disseminating their agenda? Framing Red Power analyzes the ways newspapers covered the American Indian Movement by bringing together digital technologies and traditional historiographical methodologies, allowing historians to pose new questions about the interaction between media sources and political actors.

We’ve added a page of digital history readings that we’ll keep updated as books come across our desks. I thought it might make a useful resource for readers interested in learning more about history in the digital. If you’re into the fabrication side of things, Bill Turkel has posted some light winter reading for digital humanist makers.